LEGO
LEGO is a toy theme created by the LEGO Group, a privately held company currently based in Denmark. The company releases sets containing multi-coloured bricks that interlock with each other.They also have created minifigures which also appear in sets.LEGO bricks can be assembled to construct practically almost anything, including houses cars,and robots. Early history The LEGO group originated in a workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen,a carpenter from Billund,Denmark.Christainsen began working on wooden toys in 1932,in 1934 the company would call itself Lego.The company dropped wooden toys and released plastic bricks in 1940.Lego began creating the plastic Lego bricks and named them Automatic Binding Bricks.The bricks were largely based on the design of Kiddicraft Self-Locking Bricks which were relased in the UK in 1947.The first actual Lego bricks were made from cellulose acetate and were designed to be stacked up on one another,not to interact as they do today.However the tops did have round studs on them and a hollow rectangular bottom.The blocks did snap together,but so tightly that they could not be taken apart.The company name Lego was invented by Christiansen based on the Danish phrase which means play well .The name could also be interpreted as I put together or I assemble in Latin though this would be a somewhat forced application of the general sense I collect; I gather;I Iearn the word is most used in the derived sense I read. The Lego Group's motto is Only the best is good enough translated from the Danish phrase Det bedste er ikke for godt.The motto was created by Ole Kirk to encourage his employees not to skimp on quality, a value he srongly believed in.The motto is still used inside the company today. The use of plastic toy manufacture was not highly regarded by retailers and consumers of the time.Many of the Lego Group's shipments were returned,following poor sales ; it was thought that plastic toys could never replace wooden ones. By 1954, Christiansen's son,Godtfred Kirk Christiansen , had become the junior managing director of the Lego Group.It was his conversation with an overseas buyer that struck the idea of a toy system.Godtfred saw the immense potential in Lego bricks to become a system for creative play,but the bricks still had some problems from a technical standpoint:their locking ability was limited and they were not very versatile.It was not until 1958 that the mdern-day brick design was developed ,and it took another 5 years to find the exact material for it.The modern Lego brick was patented on January 28,1958 and the bricks from that year are still compatible with current Lego bricks. Lego pieces of all varieties have been, first and foremost, part of a universal system. Despite tremendous variation in the design and purpose of individual pieces over the years, each remains compatible in some way with existing pieces. Lego bricks from 1963 still interlock with those made in 2008, and Lego sets for young children are compatible with those made for teenagers. Bricks, beams, axles, mini figures, and all other elements in the Lego system are manufactured to an exacting degree of tolerance. When snapped together, pieces must have just the right amount of "clutch power"; they must stay together until pulled apart. They cannot be too easy to pull apart, or the resulting constructions would be unstable; they also cannot be too difficult to pull apart, since the disassembly of one creation in order to build another is part of the Lego appeal. In order for pieces to have just the right "clutch power", Lego elements are manufactured within a tolerance of 2 µm] Since 1963, Lego pieces have been manufactured from a strong, resilient plastic known as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS. Precision-machined, small-capacity molds are used, and human inspectors check the output of the molds, to eliminate significant variations in color or thickness. Worn-out molds are encased in the foundations of buildings to prevent their falling into competitors' hands. According to the Lego Group, about eighteen bricks out of every million fail to meet the standard required. Only one percent of the plastic waste in Lego factories goes unrecycled. Manufacturing of Lego bricks occurs at a number of locations around the world. Molding is done at one of two plants in Denmark and Czech Republic. Brick decorations and packaging is done at plants in Denmark, United States, Mexico, and the Czech Republic. Annual production of Lego bricks averages approximately 20 billion (2×10) per year, or about 6000 pieces per second. To put this in context, if all the Lego bricks ever produced were to be divided equally among a world population of six billion, each person would have 62 Lego bricks. In 2007, Lego Group announced a restructuring of the current production setup including the outsourcing of some of the production work to Flextronics, a Singaporean electronics company. Lego Group plans to close the production facility in Enfield, Connecticut and outsource this work to the Flextronics factory in Mexico. Flextronics will also oversee the factory in Kladno, Czech Republic. The Czech facilities would also be expanded due to the planned closing of the Swiss factory in Baar, which mostly manufactured TECHNIC parts. On February 19, 2008, Lego announced that the Lego Group would instead take over operations of the Kladno factory from March 1, 2008. Today Since it began producing plastic bricks, the Lego Group has released thousands of play sets themed around a variety of topics. Examples include, but are not limited to, space, robots, pirates, vikings, medieval castles, dinosaurs, holiday locations, the wild west, the Arctic, airports, miners,Spider-Man, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, SpongeBob SquarePants, Harry Potter, and Exo-Force. New elements are often released along with new sets. There are also Lego sets designed to appeal to young girls such as the Clikits line which consists of small interlocking parts that are meant to encourage creativity and arts and crafts, much like regular Lego bricks. Clikit pieces can interlock with regular Lego bricks as decorative elements. The Lego range has expanded to encompass accessory motors, gears, lights, sensors, and cameras designed to be used with Lego components. There are even special bricks, like the Lego NXT that can be programmed with a PC or a Mac to perform very complicated and useful tasks. These programmable bricks are sold under the name Lego Mindstorms. In 2006 a new Lego Mindstorms kit called Mindstorms NXT was released. It is more advanced than the RCX, has a bigger screen than the RCX, and has a new array of sensors. They include touch, sound, light, and a new ultrasonic sensor technology. There is also a Bluetooth compatible hookup that can send and receive messages from one's cellphone and other Bluetooth compatible devices. The RCX was only compatible with Windows, but NXT is compatible with both Windows and Mac OS]. On January 28, 2008, Lego celebrated the 50th anniversary of the patent on its interlocking blocks with a worldwide building contest. Google paid tribute to the anniversary by writing its name on the Google homepage in Lego bricks, External Links Lego article on Wikipedia The Official Lego website